INDIA’S FUTURE.

Evening Star, Issue 23492, 5 February 1940, Page 6

INDIA’S FUTURE.

An interesting message comes from Calcutta. It contains the suggestion that India will be offered dominion status after the war, Britain retaining control of defence for 30 years. This statement is no way authoritative, but it is a possible solution of the present difficulties. It has been the declared policy of successive British Governments since 1917 to provide for the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-govern-ing institutions, with a view to tho progressive realisation of responsible government in British India as an integral part of the British Empire. In the Act of 1935 considerable advances to the goal were recorded. Following the outbreak of war the Congress demanded a declaration of British aims in their relation to India. The manifesto of the Congress Working Committee which embodied the demand clearly showed that Congress opinion, like the rest of opinion in India, was strongly opposed to Nazism and Fascism, which were regarded as political systems that stultify individual and national selfexpression and constitute a menace to democracy and international order. But the manifesto also expressed opposition to imperialism, even in its modern and modified British form, and invited the British Government to state in unequivocal terms the nature of its attitude towards imperialism «s related to India. In effect, it was a demand for independence after the war in a manner that would give the Indian people the right to frame their own constitution through the agency of a constituent assembly. This meant that Congress would have the whole constitutional scheme so laboriously evolved in recent years thrown into the melting pot. One of the great difficulties in arriving at a settled form of government for India, is seen in the racial .and religious divisions in the country. Most of the Congress men are Hindus, and it is difficult to convince the non-Hindu elements that a constituent assembly convened on a democratic basis would safeguard minority rights. This does not mean that political opponents of Congress are opposed to constitutional advance, but only that they are apprehensive about advance along purely Congress lines. The Congress claim to speak for the whole of India is disputed by the great majority of Moslems, nor is tho claim fully accepted by caste and lower caste Hindus. Numerous other sections stand in the line of opposition, and it may be taken for granted that tho Indian Princes will not support any demand for an independence which would be likely to see Congress influence extended to their States. In October last the Viceroy reiterated that India’s constitutional goal was dominion status, and at the end of the war the British Government would consider the Act of 1935 as open to modification in the light of Indian views, and he proposed the creation of a consultative group at the centre as a means of associating Indian opinion with the prosecution of the war. The Viceroy’s statement was a document carefully prepared after he had sounded the opinions of more than fifty leaders from all parts of the country. These meetings disclosed that political disunity existed in serious form, and that the communal relations between the Hindus and the Moslems lay as a massive stumbling block to constitutional advance other than along the lines which are implicit in the scheme of reforms embodied in the Act of 1935. This can be easily understood, for while there are about 220,000,000 Hindus in the country there are 66,000,000 Moslems, and between the two sections there is always acute feeling. As indicated, too, the attitude of the Indian Princes is one that brings serious complications into the issues.